With the use of the Internet, email and related electronic services, communications software has been increasingly called upon to handle data in a variety of formats. While the barriers to simple communications have been removed from many hardware implementations, the problem of operating system or application software being unable to display text in different languages remains.
For instance, a person browsing the World Wide Web may wish to input a search string in their native language. Some Web pages or search engines will simply accept that string in the form in which it was input, but not process the spelling, syntax or character set in native form. The search engine then performs a search as though the search were in English, usually resulting in no hits. Other Web pages may allow a user to manually specify the desired language for browsing and searching. There is a need for more robust and more highly automated language handling for general searching, messaging and other communications purposes.